Thursday, February 25, 2016

Staunton, February 25 – Unlike the
Jews who left the Soviet Union, many Jews who have left Russia and other CIS
countries have not integrated into their new countries of residence, maintain
close ties with the countries from which they left, and often are strong
supporters of Vladimir Putin and his “Russian world,” according to Emil Pain.

The Moscow sociologist who
specializes on ethnicity and ethnic conflict points out that many Kremlin
supporters say this is “a real manifestation of ‘the Russian world,’” but in
fact, he suggests, there are a variety of reasons for this pattern and many do
not support such claims (novayagazeta.ru/comments/71974.html).

In order to understand why so many
recent Russian Jewish emigres support Putin and his actions, Pain says that he
surveyed his friends in Facebook and via other means to determine the level of their integration in their new countries,
their work and status there, and “the main rhetorical clichés they use in
political discussions.”

As of now, he says, he has received “about
a hundred” responses, and he has added to them materials collected by Sergey
Medvedev from his Facebook friends and from discussions about this issue on Radio
Liberty’s Russian Service.

Between 1946 and 1986, Pain says, “almost
300,000” people left the USSR “on the Jewish quota,” which included both Jews
and members of their families of other nationalities. Between 1990 and 2007, he
continues, “more than 1.6 million Jews and members of their families” left Russia
and other CIS countries for residence abroad.

According to his research, the
Moscow expert says, “not a single one of those” who left before 1991 is among
the active supporters of Putin and the Russian world. Instead, “the last wave
of mass emigration has become the basis of Putin’s ‘Russian world.’” This
difference in behavior undermines the Kremlin’s claims.

It shows that despite what both
Russian conservatives and Russian liberals believe, there is no “innate
anti-liberalism among Russian people” and they are not condemned forever to
live according to “’the cultural code’ of the Horde.”Instead, this pattern indicates “not the
continuity of views but the ability of people to undergo rapid ideological
transformations.”

“These people,” Pain writes, “to a
significant degree broke their ties with the values and ideas which until
recently had dominated in the Jewish milieu,” including “above all oppositional
attitudes to authoritarianism in all its manifestations (to tsarism, Stalinism,
and the fuehrer principle) and also to great power chauvinism.”

“How did it happen that not a small
segment of the Russian Jewish emigration of the new wave turned out to be in
one column with the Black Hundreds supporters and Stalinists?” he asks
rhetorically, suggesting that there are so many reasons that they cannot even
be enumerated in the space of a single article.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Pain
continues, “Jewish emigres were to a large degree idealists: they fled from the
USSR to their ‘historic motherland’ or to the US, ‘choosing freedom and forever
breaking their ties with the Soviet Union.” Not surprisingly, they rapidly
integrated themselves into their new societies and sought to be useful to them.

The post-Soviet Jewish emigres, in
contrast, “have not been motivated by a desire to return to their ‘historic homeland’
or to choose freedom.” Instead, Pain says, “their decisions were more pragmatic
and their break with Russia less radical.” They preserved many ties with it and
were less inclined to integrate completely in their new places of residence.

Those Russian Jewish emigres who
support “’the Russian world’” are “among the least integrated” in Israel, the
US and elsewhere.“All of them are ‘aliens’
in their new motherland already because either they do not speak the state
language of that country or do not want to use it and have the chance to
communicate in Russian a large part of the time.”

There are many different groups
within this new wave, and there are many different reasons why some of the
recent Russian Jewish groups support Putin or his policies.“For example, some may not like Putin and
Russia, but still more do not love Ukraine and Ukrainians because
supposedly ‘they are all terrible anti-Semites and it was right to punish them
by taking away Crimea.’”

Alternatively, people in this group
may be “deeply indifferent” to Ukraine, Crimea and the Donbas, but they are “supporters
of an imagined V. Putin who in [their] opinion, ‘pacified Chechnya and showed
how we should pacify Palestine. And many Russian Jews in Germany and Israel
support Moscow because of its anti-Americanism.” In the US, in contrast, that
puts such people off.

Pain says that on the basis of his
survey, he concludes that “Jewish adepts of the ideology of ‘the Russian world’
predominate among the Russian language population of Israel, but in the US, on
the contrary, this contingent forms a clear minority.” As for Germany, there is
no clear cut answer as of yet.

Those who watch Russian-language are
profoundly affected by that, Pain says; but he notes that “television all the
same is not a GULAG, it cannot force an individual to subordinate himself to it
or even look at it.”And some Russian
Jewish emigres are now looking at non-Moscow television, but in Germany alone,
six million are viewing Moscow channels.

The new wave of Russian Jewish
emigres is not being conditioned by television alone, he argues. Instead, they
reflect the operation of “an entire line of universal psychological mechanisms,
including those described by Marcus Lee Hansen in his 1938 essay, “The Problem
of the Third Generation Immigrant.”

That American scholar showed that “migrants
oriented toward integration in a new society rapidly are alienated from the
land from which they come and demonstratively manifest their tie with the new
milieu.” Those who aren’t interested in or who cannot integrate, in contrast,
focus on their lies with the old country in order to feel more powerful.

Hansen is remembered today primarily
for his insistence that “the grandchildren [of immigrants] will remember what
their fathers and grandfathers wanted to forget.”That remains true, Pain says, but “only in
those cases when the migrants live in closed ethnic communities like a ghetto.

The situation of Russian Jewish
emigres, in contrast, in large part because few of them live in such “ghettos,”
display “the exactly opposite tendency – their cultural connection with Russia
and partial Russian identity weakens with the change of generations and their
ties with the new state strengthen.”

In Israel, “the children of emigres
from Russia having passed through school and the army inevitably begin to use
Hebrew as their main language and rapidly integrate into the life of Israeli
society, and the grandchildren of Russian emigres as a rule poorly speak
Russian and do not take part in the translation of memes of Russian television.”

“In the US,” Pain continues, “the
overwhelming majority of Jews from Russia now live beyond the boundaries of
such Russian-Jewish reservations as Brighton Beach and already therefore are
well integrated into the American milieu. The grandchildren of Russian emigres
are becoming full-fledged Yankees.”

But in Germany, too little time has
passed in order to be sure what directions things will take, Pain says; but he
suggests that “both there and in the two other countries mentioned, the ties of
Russian Jewish migrants with the political ideology of ‘the Russian world’ will
be limited to the current generation and in the future will only weaken.”

Consequently and with only rare
exceptions, the current generation will not be an important “political resource
of the current Russian powers that be” because they do not take much part in
the political life of their countries of residence and “never try to lobby or
defend the real interests of the Russian establishment in their countries.”